Love
Love. The bible calls it the greatest of all virtues. As Tony Robbins would say, we're all driven by our desires to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Well, the pleasure part is love. The love of chocolate. The love of music. The love of art. The love of ... people? Yes, people. We love other people, even us introverted, poorly socialized, computer geek, web-designer types. Therein lies the power and the future of the independent web, and the web in general. Love.
We love the respect that we receive when we pull off a design that someone on the other side of the world feels is worth saying something about. We love talking nerd talk to each other: "Who knows the latest actionscript techniques?" "How do they find all those cool sites?" "Is DHTML better than Flash for front-end development?"
Until the web came along, there were no easy avenues for me to find out about a designer in Russia, not to mention tell him how great I thought his designs were. Now, there is, and no one can take it away from us. Because, now, we love the web.
We love the web to the extent that we'll happily spend our free time conversing with other people like us in message boards and chat rooms. We love it so much that we use our quality time to build elaborate mini-masterpieces on the web to express ourselves and impress our peers. We love it so much that, even after the implosion of the technical sector in 2000 and 2001, we're still reading and writing and drawing and programming and developing web-related content and going to web seminars and supporting start-up web conferences like Flashkit and FlashForward.
Shouldn't we be doing something better with our time? Do what you love doing, I say. Take the web to the next level of communication. There will be other, newer technologies that will come along that will enhance the web significantly over the next few years. So much so, in fact, maybe we won't even recognize the web in 20 years. This, of course, will be driven by love.
Twenty years ago we were just getting used to calculators and the option of portable "analog" music. Analog? Twenty years ago touch tones made up the cutting edge of telephone technology for most of us. And computers? I already mentioned the calculators, right? There's your computer. OK, the Commodore 64, and Atari 400 were out in that time frame, but they weren't being used for what we use computers for today, and they damn well weren't as ubiquitous as computers are now. In fact, you had to use the dictionary to find out what ubiquitous meant. Now you can use your computer to open a word processor, or go to Dictionary.com to find out.
The point I'm trying to make is that because we love the web so much, our participation and passion will inevitably lead to its next wave. We'll be able to communicate our thoughts to each other faster. That's good. We'll be able to make our communications more dynamic and prettier. That's great. We'll be able to inspire our peers to even greater heights of creation with the stuff we create with these new tools. That's mah-velous.
Think about it. When I was doing BMX stuff in high school, watching the pros get massive air on a vert ramp was enough. No one thought about doing somersaults on a bike. No one thought about putting BMX tires on a road bike and jamming down a muddy hillside. No one thought about sliding down a snow covered mountain on one piece of wood instead of two. No one, that is, until a bunch of passionate and talented knuckleheads put their resources together and changed the world's concept of what is a sport.
In the same way, the network of web enthusiasts today will feed on each other, and every new minor and major web-technology breakthrough to combine ideas that no one person could ever come up with on their own. For all we know, right now there may be some guy in Israel that has recently hooked up with groups in Iceland and San Francisco to build a website that will redefine and significantly expand what we thought Flash could be used for. Maybe someone's already figured out a way to send a cell phone signal over the Internet through a wireless area network that connects to someone with a similar hookup on the other side, and maybe she just needs to connect with the right person in order to pull the whole thing off.
"Pie-in-the-sky thoughts," you say? Maybe. So let's talk about the more immediate future. How about the role that Microsoft will play in the development of the independent web? A big one. Hehehe. Seriously though, as with any entity, their biggest strengths are their biggest weaknesses. Those strengths being size and features. They're a big company and they love making big, feature rich applications. Well, big isn't always the way. Can you say Palm, or, ahem, Hand[spring]? How about Quicken? Or, here's an easy one, Flash Player? How do you think companies like Toyota and Honda got started in an area dominated by titans like GM and Ford? They understood the value of going small.
The common link between the would-be Microsoft competitive applications and devices is that they also understand the value of going small. Unfortunately, Microsoft either hasn't recognized the competitive spaces, or can't grasp the concept of small well enough to compete. Independent web designers and developers, on the other hand, understand small very well.
Can you imagine the face the web might take by combining Flash interfaces with wireless handheld interfaces or other non-computer displays? Maybe your home stereo display. Maybe your cell phone. Flash on a cell phone? There are thousands and thousands of little niche areas that will be available for us to express ourselves in, and many of us will do more than just a good job in making these areas worth looking at, literally speaking.
I imagine that designing cool little personal spaces that you can load on your car stereo deck, or view at an airport kiosk, or email to a friend's mobile phone display is a challenge a lot of us hacks would love to take on. Throw in the transparent server interactions that Flash allows and you have some heavy-duty changes on the horizon. Yep, Flash can connect to a database, retrieve information, display it, and the user is none the wiser about the whole transaction. Bzzzzzzz. ... I hear improvements in chat rooms and message boards and blogs and transactions and registration scripts coming.
What? "More immediate communication in chat rooms, blogs, and message boards," you say? Add some room for flair and you have a rich area for future development that independents will flock to. Why will they flock there? Love. Didn't I say that already? Designers love to design, and love it more when they can claim to be on the front-side of a powerful trend. More importantly, we love immediate feedback. And lastly, one of the best things about the independent web community that I've found is that we love to give positive feedback as much as receive it.
In spite of our "anti-social" dispositions we do love people. So much so that inspiring our peers and the rest of the web community with beautifully architected web sites and applications in new and different ways will continue to drive the growth of the web through the hands of the independent designer/developer.
